A blog about dining, cooking, and eating in and around Orange County, California.

Thursday, November 07, 2013

Sake 2 Me Sushi - Tustin

If you're at a certain age when your metabolism hasn't yet caught up with you, you relish places like Sake 2 Me, an all-you-can-eat sushi bar where you try to recoup your dinner investment by overeating and make the restaurant's profit margin just that much smaller.

Judging by the lines and long wait times on Friday and Saturday nights, there are a lot of people just like you. Sake 2 Me is currently one of the most popular and cost effective ways to eat sushi in Orange County. For the relatively reasonable entry fee of about $25, you can stuff yourselves full of raw fish and rolls like you've never done before...well, at least not since the last time you found a place like this.

If you haven't been, you'd be wrong to assume Sake 2 Me is a seafood buffet, where the sushi rolls engender the fear of God or diarrhea. No, Sake 2 Me is an honest-to-goodness sushi bar.

Their nigiri is actually made-to-order. Everything you mark down on the sheet of order paper (which are organized in rounds), from your first piece to your fiftieth, will be cut, molded and then served like any sushi bar would...except you're not thinking about how much money you have left in your bank account, but rather how much room you have left in your stomach.

Know when you go that the rolls are gut fillers, most often drowned in sauces sticky sweet, Sriracha-spicy, or mayo-rich. But most of their nigiri sushi are notably well done, with the fish sliced so thick you begin to wonder how they turn a profit.

Freebies like crabmeat nachos on wontons are also offered without you even asking for it. But when you think about it, they're actually not freebies--they're insurance policies the restaurant takes out to get you full faster before your gluttony puts them out of business.